Why do we love music?

Good topic

I love music because it expresses and demands emotions, ideas, visions that cannot be articulated any other way. Whatever feelings or dreams lie deep inside you, music can directly stimulate them, bypassing all the usual crap. I love literature, poetry, painting and film (even some television!), but even the best of it is filtered and artificial compared to the mainline rush of music.

For me, music is intensely personal. I've always placed concerts and other social musical situations way behind the pleasure of a putting on a pair of headphones. I guess when it gets right down to it, I'm an escapist...

i like music because i like art, and music happens to
be one that can carry a lot of messages in a small
package.

Peter that was beautifully said.

My high school music teacher who recently passed away was from Germany. His name was Helmut Winkler and he really appreciated the work of Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band. During WWII he was the conductor of a Wermacht marching band. Glenn Miller music was forbidden to be listened to in Nazi Germany as at the the time as it existed as a morale booster for allied military men. Mr. Winkler would listen to Glenn Miller music broadcasted from England on a piece of crap short wave radio he rigged up in his attic at the risk of being shot by the Gestapo. In high school he would always emphasize that we were playing the same arrangements of Glenn Miller pieces in our stage band, String Of Pearls, In The Mood and Moonlight Serenade. We won a top prize at a music competition as a result.

 

Music resides inside of us. We will die for it.

When I was a kid I had a very severe case of Asthma and on those days Sports were out of limits for asthma patients, so I had to find something that could take the place of whet healthy kids could do, thanks God my Mother always gave me good music (Classical) and suported me when I started to listen prog', at the point that she's a Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel and Patrick Moraz fan today, something strange for a person that started to listen Prog' when her son was 13.

When I was 14 I stoped caring for my asthma and started to surf all the year and play football (The real one, not the USA) but never lost my love for music.

Music is part of my life, I couldn't survive without it, music is with me when I'm happy, sad, worried or in any humour, it's one of my best friends.

Iván

We love music for many reasons, but I'd like to put forward the real, physical, provable reason (such is my wont!).

Music consists of soundwaves. Nothing earth-shattering there.

Each soundwave has it's own effect on you in a physical way - not just through your aural receptors, but your entire body. You will find the vibrations caused by the soundwaves individually and in concert with each other cause you to feel good or bad about the music in many ways. You really are "picking up good vibrations..."

Another physical way in which music can have a direct effect and make you "love" it, is chemical. Put simply, the vibrations caused by the soundwaves cause your body to produce chemical reactions. Combine those with powerful lyrics, and a song can move you to tears (a chemical reaction). Sometimes music alone can do this - such is its power.

It's easy to demonstrate just how powerful soundwaves are - a soprano singing the C two octaves above middle C can famously smash a wine glass, because the sound waves resonate at the same frequency as the glass. A very low frequency can also cause a building to crumble into dust.

Combining certain frequencies into pleasing patterns is the art of composition. Since different bodies resonate sympathetically or negatively to different combinations of frequencies, we have different tastes. If the composer gets the patterns right for you, he/she has succeeded at her art, and you have a piece of music you love.

I don't know about you... but it keeps me sane... better reason than any!

I have been surrounded by music my whole life. It is THE universal language. I've noticed that people tend to be a bit more polite and social in places where music is playing. Conversations flow when the music is soothing and played at an "ear comforting" level. I've started more conversations (not just pick ups, eh!) because the person seemed to enjoy the music. A simple, "I like that tune, too" and the ice is broken.

Music heals. John Lee Hooker nearly said it all with "Blues is the Healer." I have seen that and felt it. Music can pull you out of a depression, mend a disagreement with a loved one, ease the pain of a migraine or help blow off a bad day at work or school.

On the other hand, music can move you to do stupid things. It's a dis-inhibitor, not unlike alcohol. It can be intoxicating in it's pull. Maybe even addictive. I know I gotta have it and I feel sh*tty when I don't.

others are always far more eloquent than I

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
--George Jean Nathan

Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.
--E.Y. Harburg (Edgar Yipsel) (1898 - 1981)

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
--Anais Nin

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Without music, life is a journey through a desert
--Pat Conroy

Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
--Yehudi Menuhin

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and dream dreams.
--Eric Anderson

I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
--Josephine Baker (1906-1975) French dancer

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
--Albert Schweitzer (01/14/1875-1965)

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
--Victor Hugo

Where words fail, music speaks.
--Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) Danish short-story writer, poet

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
--Maya Angelou

All the sounds of the earth are like music.
--Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960)

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
--Ursula K. Le Guin

In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.
--George Szell

You are the music while the music lasts.
--T. S. Eliot

Katie Greenwood
Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, You learn notes to play to the music of your soul.

Red Auerbach
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Benjamin Britten
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
 
Thomas Carlyle
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

George Eliot (1819-80), [Mary Ann Evans] British writer
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
 
Geoffrey Latham
Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Theodore Mungers
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

 
Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

Charlie Parker
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Zimbabwe Proverb
If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

And finally….
 
Frank Zappa
Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best.
 
Noel Coward
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

 

Music is a communication, an expression. When taken so far (this really applies to any form of expression) it is very touching and it creates a unique experience. It allows you to enter the mind or conciousness of the artist making the music and experience there state of mind. It really takes you places, it progresses(ah thats where that word came from) and progressive music is the chief among the genres because........its not really even a genre it's too broad but thats the beuty of it: it's so open. Any music that takes you places (even for less than a second) is prog.